The subject matter of this disclosure is generally related to computers, and more particularly to virtual memory. Virtual memory is an abstraction of physical resources. For example, virtual memory may be used to provide more apparent memory capacity than is actually available by representing physical memory resources such as RAM (Random access Memory) and physical storage such as HDDs (Hard Disk Drives) as contiguous addresses of memory. However, performance may suffer because RAM exhibits lower latency than HDDs.
One environment in which virtual memory may be used is a data center. Servers, sometimes referred to as hosts, run data processing applications that may be referred to as host applications. Examples of host applications may include but are not limited to file servers, email servers, block servers and databases. Host application data may be maintained by storage arrays. In particular, the host application data is maintained on managed drives. Computing nodes such as storage servers manage access to the managed drives. For example, the computing nodes may present logical storage devices to the host servers for storage of the host application data, where the logical storage devices are backed by the managed drives. The host servers may access the host application data by sending IOs with reference to the logical storage devices. The storage arrays implement the IOs by accessing the managed drives based on metadata that provides a mapping between the logical storage devices and the managed drives. Virtual memory may be used by host and storage arrays.